Shooting at the walls of heartache: Memories from your first formal dance

Please excuse the larger-than-normal number of spelling mistakes and grammar errors. It’s hard to write from the fetal position. I had a lot of great times as a teen, enjoyed school and was a really good employee in a variety of jobs. I don’t live with a lot of regret. But the whole dating thing was extremely difficult for me from ages 15 to 25. And I’m about to write down the most awkward part for you.

For those coming in late, this is the promised follow-up after my discovery, during a routine Let’s Go to the Morgue! archive search, of a photo featuring my first girlfriend at the prom with one of the boyfriends that came after me. (The original post is here. Read it first.) Rather than write about my senior prom — which I remember less and was only marginally humiliating — I thought I’d focus on the much more detail-filled first formal dance. Please share stories from your prom or first formal in the comments.

Let’s start with a prologue …

Prologue: I started talking to Shannon a lot toward the end of our freshman year French class with Mrs. Scattini at Burlingame High. (Through no fault of the teacher, I don’t remember a word of French from that class, except the words to this song.) I was maybe 5-foot-2 in the beginning of my sophomore year, weighed about 100 pounds and couldn’t for the life of me feather my hair — so I figured a monastery was my best bet. It was and still is one of the greatest shocks of my life that Shannon, a totally attractive and nice girl, agreed to go out with me.

Our first date was to see “Rocky IV.” My sister drove us there in our family’s powder blue Peugoet station wagon to the cinema in San Bruno. I misread the newspaper movie section or there was a misprint (I blame you, Chronicle!), so we showed up in the middle of the movie. We ended up watching the last 45 minutes, hanging out in the lobby while they cleaned out the theater, and then watching the first hour. And I can tell you from experience that “Rocky IV” is no less of a chick flick when you watch it from back to front. So you can see that I was basically undateable.

My first formal dance was as a sophomore, at the 1985 winter formal, located in the enchanting all-purpose room in the Burlingame Recreation Department. I had been to dances there in middle school, but I’m sure I never left the coat check room, where I watched 8th graders playing bumper pool. I checked with at least eight of Shannon’s friends first to see she’d say yes, so actually asking if she wanted to go to the formal was only a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10 on the excruciating discomfort index.

Apologies to Bryan and Matt, who have no clue I’m writing any of this.

I triple-dated with my lifelong friends Matt and Bryan; we made dinner for our dates at Bryan’s mother’s house on Bayswater Ave. in Burlingame. Somehow Bryan and I ended up color coordinating our electric blue bow ties and cummerbunds, which matched our dates’ dresses. Matt wore peach. He was going with a senior named Melissa so he could do whatever the @#$% he wanted.

There were talks of “going the limo route,” but we ended up getting chauffered by my friend Matt’s dad in his two-toned beige and brown Dodge conversion van. (Which would later become an important character in my Van Halen/first concert story. I could write a book about stuff that happened in Matt’s dad’s van.) I remember there was a delay picking up Bryan’s date Stacey, so we were more than a half hour late to meet Shannon’s parents, and I was lying on the floor of the van completely freaking out as we pulled up. Matt’s dad, a supremely cool badass blue collar worker for United, was laughing and trying to calm me down. During the pick-up I was nervous, kept petting Shannon’s dog and couldn’t make eye contact with her parents. Her super-nice mother was polite but had to ask me a couple of questions twice.

Did I mention we had dinner at Bryan’s mom’s house? We made fettucini alfredo, which seemed really exotic at the time. I started my lifetime habit of being completely unable to eat when I’m around a girl I like. I once had to get off the phone with my current wife (long before we were dating) so I could go and throw up.

Half of the photos I possess of this night are of me, Bryan and Matt getting ready in the bathroom. (I won’t be sharing those with you any time soon. Maybe if I get a terminal disease …) I think Matt helped me a lot with my hair, which doesn’t look like that in any other photo in existence. We had what then seemed like the classiest dinner ever … candles! flowers! silverware! … and played music on Bryan’s mother’s hi-fi. It started out with classical music at his mother’s urging, but after she left I’m guessing the hard stuff came out. And by “hard stuff” I mean Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Bryan Adams “Reckless” or whatever Scandal album had “The Warrior” on it. We didn’t develop musical taste until we started listening to “The Unforgettable Fire” later that year.

My memory beyond dinner is incomplete, and honestly, nothing happened at that dance except dancing and making out. I don’t think we drank but I could be wrong. I think we went to Bryan’s after the dance and we all probably made out some more. She was my first kiss.

I have absolutely no memory of how Shannon or I got home. Maybe we teleported. It was a magical night.

Note that most of the above qualifies as positive memories. Even the sort of pathetic parts (the fettucini, Scandal) were happy for me at the time. The discomfort mostly comes when I think about the aftermath. Like a lot of 15-year-old boys, I got this sort of indestructible feeling once I realized a girl liked me, and turned from a really sweet kid into sort of a selfish a–hole. At the same time, I didn’t start really liking myself until about 10 years later. I cringe when I think about how I acted in any romantic situation between, say, 1985 and 1996. Shannon and I dated for the rest of the school year if I remember correctly, and I was pretty mean to her during the last few months before we broke up. Come to think of it, I can’t think of a single dance after that where at least one of the girls in our circle of friends wasn’t crying in the lobby for most of the evening.

I did save one of my prom photos.

After it ended, Shannon briefly dated my friend Mike, a second guy I didn’t like who we won’t even mention, and she ended up going to the senior prom with Renato — an extremely nice and really good-looking guy who was a year younger than us. He’s the one in the Chronicle photo. I liked Renato a lot and was honestly happy for both of them.

I went to the senior prom with a girl from neighboring Mills High School who I barely knew but had a big crush on from a few short conversations while I was working in the children’s section at the Burlingame Public Library. It was one of those situations that works out really great in a John Hughes movie, and can be awkward in real life. I will say that the low point came when I left her corsage on the roof when I went to pick her up, and it blew off the top of the car, probably somewhere on Burlingame Avenue.

My date and I did end up having a nice time — at least I did — but for reasons I can’t quite fathom now (she looked like Kim Kardashian, except she was nice/not dumb), I never called her after that, and later heard through a mutual friend that she was understandably very pissed. I left an apologetic note on her doorstep with the prom photos that she paid for and never spoke with her again. Coward. I sometimes say that out loud, seemingly out of nowhere, when I’m driving along and suddenly think of some bonehead romantic move from high school or college. “Coward!”

The reunion photo. It’s nice that no one hated each other.

Epilogue: I stayed in touch with my friends for a few years after school — above is a reunion photo of the six of us from that formal dance, probably five to seven years later when we were all in college. I had a nice conversation with Shannon at our 20-year high school reunion a couple of years ago and we occasionally exchange e-mails. I had a big scare a couple of years ago when the Burlingame High alumni newsletter misreported that she had died. (Journalistic standards, people!) She’s married and lives in North Carolina with her husband and a boy and a girl, who are about the same ages as my sons. She still seems like a really nice person.

I remained an distant a**hole/work-in-progress as a boyfriend for most of the next decade, but it served a purpose. That’s what you should take away from this, ex-girlfriends and ex-dates. You can never get back the night/three months/year/eight years that you spent with me, but I learned from the mistakes, and I’m a good father now and I think a very good husband. I apologize to you. And my wife greatly appreciates the sacrifices you made in the name of making me less of a doofus jerkhead.

That’s all I’ve got. Our formal photo is below the Scandal video. Feel free to cut it out and put it in your wallet, with “Stay cool! Have a great summer! -Peter” written on the back.

Your formal dance/prom memories in the comments.

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimes often has nothing to do with parenting. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub. Our Facebook page is here. Your questions answered on VYou at www.vyou.com/peterhartlaub.